John of Damascus

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John of Damascus, called John Damascene, was a Greek-speaking Christian monk and priest of the early eighth century whose great work gathered the inheritance of earlier Greek theology into a single ordered exposition — the synthesis that became, for the Eastern Church, the closest thing it had to a standard textbook of doctrine. He was born in Damascus around 675, under Muslim rule, into a family that held office in the Umayyad administration; tradition holds that he served the caliphate himself before withdrawing to the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judaean desert, where he was ordained and where he died, by the usual reckoning, around 749.

The setting is worth holding in view, because it shapes everything that follows. Damascus in the late seventh century was the seat of the Umayyad caliphate, a city where a Christian could rise high in a Muslim state. The family name was Arabic — Mansur — and the household belonged to the Greek-speaking Christian administrative class that the new order inherited from the old Byzantine province and did not at first displace. John’s grandfather had managed the city’s finances under the last Roman governor and went on serving under the caliphs; his father held a similar charge. By the account that has come down, John took up the same office of revenue before leaving it for the desert. He wrote, then, as a subject of Islam rather than of the emperor in Constantinople — a position that would prove decisive when the controversy over images broke, for it placed him beyond the reach of the power he opposed.

His withdrawal to the desert came in the years after 730. Mar Saba — the Great Lavra founded by Saint Sabas in the fifth century, hanging on the cliffs of the Kidron gorge between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea — was by John’s day a center of Greek learning and liturgical composition, and it was there, ordained priest in the patriarchate of Jerusalem, that he did his writing. The later tradition surrounds his retreat with legend: that the iconoclast emperor Leo III forged a letter to incriminate him before the caliph, that John’s hand was struck off in punishment and miraculously restored after he prayed before an icon of the Virgin — the story behind the image of the Mother of God of the three hands. Whatever the legend preserves, the documented life is that of a monk who turned a lifetime’s administrative training to the ordering of doctrine and the making of hymns; the byname Chrysorrhoas, the gold-streaming, attached itself to him for the flow of his speech.

The Fount of Knowledge

His best-known book is the Fount of Knowledge (Pege gnoseos). Its three parts move from philosophical groundwork through a catalog of heresies to the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, the section read and copied on its own for centuries afterward. What John attempted there was less original system than careful arrangement: he set out to say what the Greek Fathers had already taught, organized so that it could be held together and handed on. He named the method himself — to set down nothing of his own, but to bind into order what the teachers before him had scattered through many works.

The first part, the Dialectica or Philosophical Chapters, supplies the instruments. It borrows the apparatus of Aristotelian logic — the definition, the five predicables, the ten categories, the vocabulary of substance and accident, genus and species, nature and hypostasis — and turns it to the service of doctrine. This is not philosophy pursued for itself but philosophy made a handmaid: the precise terms by which the Church had learned, across the Christological centuries, to say that the incarnate Logos is one hypostasis in two natures, or that the Trinity is one ousia in three hypostases. The marriage of pagan logic to revealed teaching was not John’s invention — the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor had worked the same seam — but he set it out as a teachable propaedeutic, a grammar of the faith. It is an early, deliberate instance of the union of philosophy and theology that the Latin schoolmen would later carry much further, and that hardened, in the West, into scholasticism.

The choice of logic over metaphysics is itself a position. John takes from Aristotle the tools of distinction and classification — the means of saying clearly what is one and what is many, what is shared and what is proper — without taking on the philosopher’s cosmos or his account of the soul as binding doctrine. The categories are servants; they tell the theologian how to keep nature and person from collapsing into each other when the subject is the Trinity or the incarnate Christ, where a careless word becomes a heresy. That instinct — that precise terminology is the safeguard of right belief — is the engine of the whole Fount of Knowledge, and it is what the medieval West recognized and adopted: not a system to be received whole, but a discipline of definition that could be applied to anything.

The second part, On Heresies, runs through roughly a hundred errors in sequence, much of it compiled from earlier catalogs, the last entries brought up to John’s own day. Its closing chapter, on the religion he calls that of the Ishmaelites, is among the earliest sustained Christian accounts of Islam written by someone who lived within its world — read now less as polemic than as a witness, a Damascene Christian describing from inside the caliphate the faith that had become his rulers’ creed. The classifying impulse is the same one that governs the whole work: to name a thing exactly is to know where it stands against the rule of orthodox teaching.

The third part, the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, is the summit and the most durable. In a hundred chapters it moves from the unknowable God and the Trinity, through creation, the angelic ranks and the visible cosmos, to the person and work of the incarnate Word, the sacraments, the veneration of the cross and the saints, and the last things. It is a summa before the word — a complete account of the faith in compact order — and it circulated on its own, detached from the rest, for the better part of a thousand years. The Eastern Church received it as the settled deposit of patristic teaching, the book a student of doctrine could be handed and trust.

The Latin afterlife

The Exposition did not stay in the Greek East. In 1153 or 1154, at the commission of Pope Eugenius III, Burgundio of Pisa rendered it into Latin as the De fide orthodoxa, and through that translation John entered the schools of the medieval West at the moment they were forming. Peter Lombard drew on it for the Sentences, the textbook that every later master had to gloss; through the Sentences and through the translation directly, John’s distinctions passed to Bonaventure, to Thomas Aquinas, and to their contemporaries. The Damascene’s compact definitions of how knowledge of God is possible, of will and nature, of the modes of the Incarnation, became common property of the Latin masters, cited by name. The debt runs in both directions across the later division of the churches: a book composed in a Palestinian monastery under Arab rule, gathering the Greek Fathers, became one of the channels by which the Greek inheritance reached the Latin university — so that the schoolmen who built the Western synthesis were, in part, reading the East through John.

The defense of the images

He wrote in the middle of the first great controversy over images. When the Byzantine emperors moved to forbid the veneration of icons, John — living outside imperial reach, under a different sovereign — composed three Treatises on the Divine Images in their defense. The argument turns on the Incarnation. The God of the older covenant could not be depicted, John grants, precisely because no one had seen him; but in taking visible flesh, the invisible God had made himself describable, and to refuse now to render him in image was to deny that he had truly come in the body. The matter of the cosmos — wood, paint, stone — was not therefore to be despised, for the Maker had not despised it. And the honor paid to an image, he drew the crucial distinction, does not rest on the wood and pigment but passes through them to the one depicted, as honor shown a portrait of the emperor is honor to the emperor and not to the panel. Veneration of the image (proskynesis) is not the worship (latreia) owed to God alone; the icon is a door, not a god.

To the iconoclast charge that the images broke the commandment against graven likenesses, John answers from the history of salvation itself: the prohibition of Sinai bound a people prone to the idols of the nations and ignorant still of the form God would take, but the prohibition was not the last word. The same Scripture that forbade images of the unseen God ordered the cherubim worked in gold over the ark and the figures woven into the veil of the sanctuary. What changed everything was the Incarnation — the moment the boundless took on circumscribable flesh — and an image is exactly a record of that circumscription. To paint Christ is to confess that he was truly seen and truly handled; to forbid it, John argues, is to drift back toward the old denials that the Word had come fully in the body. The matter behind the argument is theological before it is artistic: a doctrine of creation in which the visible can carry the holy because its Maker entered it.

The emperors held a council at Hieria in 754 that condemned the images and anathematized their defenders, John among them, by then dead. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 reversed that judgment and vindicated his position, and the distinction he had drawn — between the relative honor of the image and the absolute worship of God — became part of how the Eastern tradition justifies its icons. Later Orthodox theology, the Gregory Palamas of the fourteenth-century revival among them, would build on the same ground; but the architecture was already in place in the three treatises written from Mar Saba while the quarrel was at its height.

What he carried, and from whom

His debts to earlier thought are openly carried; he meant them to be visible. From the writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite he took the language of God’s unknowability and the ordered ranks of being — the apophatic insistence that the divine nature is grasped not by what it is but by what it is not, and the hierarchy of intelligences descending from the source. From Origen he drew, with care and with correction, on the great Alexandrian’s exegesis and speculative reach; from Maximus the Confessor, the architecture of nature and will worked out in the Christological controversies of the preceding century; from the Cappadocians — Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregories — the Trinitarian grammar and the very terms in which the faith is stated. He quotes the Fathers continually and by name; the originality, where it lies, is in the ordering and the economy, the gift for saying briefly and exactly what others had said at length.

This is the standard estimate of him: less the innovator than the man who closed an age. He stood at the end of the patristic centuries — monasticism behind him in the Judaean lavra, the whole Christian Greek tradition stretched out before him — and bound their work into a form durable enough to outlast the world that made it. The Eastern Church remembers him as a saint and as a maker of its liturgical hymns, the canons and odes still sung in its services. The Western, having borrowed his summary through Burgundio’s Latin, eventually named him a Doctor of the Church — the title conferred by Pope Leo XIII in 1890, more than eleven centuries after his death. He is among the last figures the two traditions can claim together without dispute.

Editions, translation, and scholarship

The critical text of John’s works is the four-volume Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, edited by the Benedictine Bonifatius Kotter in the Patristische Texte und Studien series (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1969–1981), with a posthumous fifth volume of homilies; the edition is continued under the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. It was Kotter who showed that each part of the Fount of Knowledge was built to the round measure of a hundred chapters — the century form of the ascetic literature applied to dogmatics. The standard English of the whole Fount of Knowledge is Frederic H. Chase Jr.’s Saint John of Damascus: Writings (Fathers of the Church 37, Catholic University of America Press, 1958); the Exact Exposition alone appears in the older translation of S. D. F. Salmond in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 9, freely available through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and at New Advent. The Philosophical Chapters and the treatises on the images are gathered in the same Chase volume. The fullest modern study is Andrew Louth’s St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford University Press, 2002), which sets John against the Palestinian monasteries of the first Arab century and argues that the dismissal of him as a mere compiler badly underrates the shaping intelligence in the ordering. For the Dionysian source on which he leaned, the hosted Parker translation of the Works of Dionysius the Areopagite gives the apophatic and hierarchical language at first hand.

→ In the library: Parker — The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1897, 1899)

→ Related: Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Aristotle · Origen · Logos · Thomas Aquinas · Scholasticism · Basil Of Caesarea · Apophatic Theology · Byzantine Empire · Christianity · Islam · Liturgy · Heresy · Monasticism · Gregory Palamas · Bonaventure · Johannes Scotus Eriugena